 Hey, good afternoon everybody Tom Stewart here. I'm with Liz Trotter. This is smart business moves. It is Wednesday, February 24 It's almost my mommy's birthday Yeah, yeah, almost Is Olivia up there? She was a little while ago. I was gonna turn for you guys No, you know, she must have gone outside Bob and Carol's anniversary. Those are my in-laws Janice's parents 59 years Gosh one more year. That's a big what's 60 year anniversary? What do you get? Like gold and gold silver gold Over 50 golden. Yeah. No isn't golden is 50 silver is 25. So I bet diamond diamond Yeah And they knew each other like in grade school or something they've known each other for 71 years Wow Yeah, that's a long time. Hey, Denise Good to see you. I got a Diamond 60 years is diamond. I had a feeling hey Linda Alrighty Hey ladies doing today. Yes, you're coming back some more KPI torture We did we did good yesterday. Oh We we we got through a really hard Topic yesterday Tom, which I think it's a it's a new idea a new idea in our industry And it's a new idea for You know just The people that we normally interact with hey Robin and So I'm really glad that that we have a lot of engagement around it We gave people a chance to see this idea and how it can work. Hopefully people like noodle down in a little bit overnight our Really have discussion with myself as to you know, did we want to go down that path or not? Because we could have finished that discussion two days ago if we didn't but it's really important and It's something that's novel concept to a lot of people now, but in a couple of years I think it's going to be commonplace Yeah, everybody's going to be doing yet. There's too much opportunity If we can get on board with the idea now We can we can get ahead of it and make more money than what we would if we didn't Yeah, and be in front of it instead of behind it and trying to chase it chase it down All right. Well, you had some new info for us today some other kinds of numbers, right Tom Yeah, happy to see and hear about some of some of the COVID numbers are improving improving a lot they one of the metrics that Everybody tracks Hey Robin, we're gonna be talking about we're gonna be talking about KPIs and we're gonna be normalizing Some some allowed an actual times here in a little bit and then we're gonna move on from that today But we're just kind of doing a update on some some current events, I guess She wants to know what we were talking about Tom because she hit the what before you ever opened up the COVID thing It was the normalizing times Robin is what we were talking about We're gonna we'll get back to that a little bit too. It was all this stuff here that we were having so much fun with yesterday We're just excited to Be bringing that to the industry too because we know that it is going to be a really big deal It's just something that people in our industry We're such a small little industry that you know, we don't what we're not cutting edge I have a lot of this stuff, but some things we can be so Yeah, and when we are it's it's gonna help us and we're gonna be more profitable and we're gonna be Building, you know better businesses and making better jobs and providing better service and We won't be hating life Although, you know, it's not hard to kind of get in a in a rut in this business where we're you know I've heard more than one when business owners say they hate their business I'm sad when I hear that but I also have heard that more times than I like to think about Be honest. Have you ever been to a point where you've just asked yourself do I really want to do this anymore? I Actually have come once Yeah, you know, I had been I mean it's a long time ago, but there were there were times when And not only me, you know, I had friends and family members telling me to Isn't it time yet to get out of this whole cleaning thing you've been doing to Almost use profanity there. No need to go there. But you know, so I've been fortunate to never have anyone that wasn't supportive I've been very fortunate that way Good news though the positivity rates for covert are going down There was a kind of a benchmark that often has been bounced around like five percent or less Positivity rates. So like less than five percent of the people are getting tested or positive That's kind of been a benchmark for for, you know, a lot of communities To start, you know loosening up a little bit and start, you know, moving towards behaving more like things Look at this Is one of the most positive people I know yay That's awesome Robin. Thank you. Thank you Yeah, the positivity rate on the national level is below five percent Which is pretty cool because it wasn't you know that long ago maybe a month ago it was more than twice that and Was going up now just because the national levels below five percent doesn't mean that You know, everybody's an awesome place I'll drop this link if anybody wants to you know get more information about the particular state that they're in This is Johns Hopkins and they've got they've got the best data out there. Oh, yeah, definitely nice credible You know if you're in Alaska, that's awesome. You know, they're like 1.7. However, they're still at 22 So they're not, you know, they just lost some some wood to chop in Alabama Show me Washington real quick Fingers tired One look at you. All right. That's good. I love it Vermont would be awesome. Wow, no kidding 1.5 Vermont. Oh, wow You see this one spike right here. There's something goofy with your data Yeah, line is not awesome in terms of how they report their numbers. They have some violent swings cuz You had none zero and then They kind of got all the paperwork up and turned it all in at once I don't know on one day What the number of cases is dropping? Anyway Did you see that that was not good wait, what's with Puerto Rico one hundred percent? Yeah, but look, they're they're only doing like five tests per 5.2 tests per hundred thousand people Yeah, but every single one is positive. Yeah, but you're so you're like if I only have five tests for 100,000 people, you know, you're only gonna give it to like I Shouldn't be laughing Well, look South Dakota is pretty terrible at twenty two point three and they're up this week I got to go with some friends. I went to school with last night and we were we were doing all of this through text But we were swapping Tiger Woods jokes and that's not cool either, but I don't know what your woods jokes are He was you know who he is The golfer he was in a bad car wreck yesterday. Oh, he was no, I didn't know. Is he okay? But he like messed his leg up Landed but not his arms. He needs his arms, right? I guess you need your place to play golf too That's where it all starts it. It's kind of bad. Oh, no, he's kind of drove on the road for no understandable reason and Driving is a part of golf and it kind of anyway. Let's not go there. Oh, I get it. I get it now. All right I get the driving connection Let's go back to code for it for a little bit go through this We got a we got a we got to get back to our spreadsheets here. We don't We don't want those API's This is some pretty awesome news that it looks like the J&J vaccine is going to be approved for like emergency use by the end of the week and both Moderna and Pfizer are doubling down on the amount of vaccine that they're going to be pushing out. So You know, it looks like we're gonna be a wash in vaccine here the next couple of months Which is it's gonna be good? Right now I still I'm approved to get one But I still haven't been able to find anyone to give it to me everybody's out Look, but it looks like that's gonna lighten up here in the next week or so Why me think that that's just a matter of time and the belief is that pretty soon We're we're not gonna be supply constrained anymore. We're gonna have vaccine and be trying to You know coach and course people into to taking it Yeah, well right now they we're not having that problem. That's for darn sure Um We looked at this over the last couple of days we've seen this about the changes to It's PPP and they're gonna be giving preference to companies that are less than than 20 employees This was announced Monday But for the next couple of weeks if you've got a company with more than 20 employees You know, I would follow up my bank if you're still trying to get approved but They might not Castlekeepers we've got several branches and a couple of them have less than 20 employees and All of a sudden like today we started getting these emails asking more questions and trying to You know, it sounds like all of a sudden those applications are more important than they were a couple of days ago Nice go figure nice. Yeah Here's something that's new And this was this came out today and this is more Coming coming out of the White House that they're changing some of the rules in terms of how PPP applies to like self-employed people and in independent contractors You're an independent contractor contractor you really don't have a payroll per se and You really didn't benefit a lot from PPP, but they changed the calculations for for for for these classifications to term you PPP based on top-line revenue, which means they're gonna be getting a lot more money Hey, and Oh, but those rules don't go in effect until I think the second week of March That's almost here next week What their talent saying though is if you one of these if you're you fall in these categories and you've already applied or you apply today You get your money based upon the old rules What they're saying is if you're like an independent contractor or meet this new criteria you might want to wait until Okay, maybe it might be as early as next week wait until next week and do it because you'll get more money Okay, oh, that's good information for sure They feel like that information What else is there right? Yeah, this is very very true. Yeah You know sitting around, you know having a cookie and potato chips. Hey, I got an idea Formula for Most of the changes though have been in everyone's best interest not always I mean, there have been a couple times where it was like ah darn but but not too much like with the You know when they made the change to the PPP about how much you could spend on what how much you could spend on another thing It was like darn why they changed that and they messed this all up They didn't really matter in the end anyway because the form is just like How much did you spend? How much did you have so it didn't really matter where you spent it or anything it was like it It's all easily easily forgiven So It seems it seems like it was gonna be so hard Yeah, it's gonna take so much work and wow There's so much work to trying to track every single dollar where you're spending it from which pool from which account Yeah Not so much. No, not so much ended up being pretty unnecessary That's okay. Better to have it done and not need it than not have it done and need it Okay. Yeah, yeah, trust me on that. Just trust me You don't have to process it. All right, so it's to some team. Are you all ready to get back here again? We spent some time talking about I guess the math behind rate adjustments and I guess What we believe to be the most I mean, I mean the numbers speak for themselves You can maximize your your your value out of your your cleaning professionals and every account if you go through the process of Figuring out the productivity rates of your cleaning professionals and applying those productivity rates to actual job times to get the Normalized job times and you use those to determine if you're pricing correctly And if you do that, you're gonna wind up Doing adjustments for the for for the right customers and not doing adjustments for ones who who don't need them and you're gonna What it does it gets you out of the mindset of well If I'm looking for $45 an hour and if I look at every job that I do an average if it comes out to be 45 You feel good about it, but Some of them you're making 55 and some of them you're making 35 or less and the ones that are less than 45 You want to know it, but if you don't go through the process of doing this normalized math here Then you can't really do it with confidence Maximizing the amount of money that you can make off of your labor hours because remember we always go back to That's where you're gonna be able to make the biggest impact in your company is by impacting that labor And we're told that well, this is hard Going through this exercise is hard. I don't want to do it. I'm okay if some of my jobs I'm really not making that much money on and I Think that we're focusing on the wrong hard things. I mean cleaning homes is what's hard, right? Okay, but no Tom like I don't think you fully comprehend though, none Well, you know around So that and that's not true. Okay, so Here's here's the thing that you don't comprehend There's two things that are really working against people One is people are just not as comfortable with spreadsheets period as you are you know that already That for you spreadsheets are very second nature. Just this this this the other other people have to think to fill in one box It's like, okay So what is it that I have to put here again? and if this number is divided by this number, which one do I put in first and So it's much harder just that piece Okay, on top of that, you don't even do the spreadsheet Central and they don't know makes the whole thing easy Okay My point is you don't really have a realistic understanding of You know the the daunting depths and breadth of what this is When Because you're so used to you know made central just does it it's like Yeah, why just push that button That's not what it's like. So it really is It's harder than you think it I think it's harder than cleaning homes I'm sorry. I I would agree with the majority of people that think this is harder than cleaning homes Cleaning homes, I could pretty much get you know Eight-year-olds to clean homes a lot of times, but I'm not finding anybody that can do this for me. This is difficult So and when you don't know when you don't understand it and you're not familiar with it You you're not familiar with spreadsheets and you don't have made central most people don't right? So they're going to have to do this with the spreadsheet. It's daunting It's daunting So do it I don't think we we need to I think we've given everybody the idea Hopefully you guys have noodled on it a bit and you're able to see the wisdom of the normalizing and how to go about that And then over time we'll be adding some more of this in absolutely But you know, we have now spent two days on normalizing because it is difficult I think people are just gonna have to accept it absorb it and then Begin to figure out how it can work. Maybe in their businesses Because that that's the key piece right and like we've been saying all along don't have to do everything You just gotta you just got to do some stuff get those green numbers up get those red numbers going down and It's gonna be a win and I know that you think that yeah, but this one will make numbers move really big in a really good way At at at the very least as long as we're aware and we're thinking about it and we're looking beyond The obvious. Yeah, the obvious in this industry is Get more leads book more jobs clean more homes and run the credit cards and And that's you know, and if I'm not making enough money, I just need to do more Yeah, I need to to put more jobs and You know, I mean booking more jobs is an opportunity to be more profitable, but you know, hopefully we've we've Made been making the point here in an effective way that It's not sufficient. There's more to it than than than that. Yeah, absolutely that you Got to be able to you got to be able to Be watching that profit margin how important that that piece is right really really always focusing in on that net profit No matter what your size is Right because as your company gets bigger. Do you want that enough profit to shrink? No, you don't It would be really nice to keep a nice healthy net profit. No matter what your size is, right? And sometimes you can get lucky and be profitable, but we want to Make it happen rather than just happened stumbled across that So, all right, so we talked a lot about rate adjustments But now we we when we have talked about rate increases. We've talked quite a bit about rate increases I don't think we ever shared any rate increased letters I think we were going to do that at some point in time So maybe we could do that Let me right here Yeah, I letters get a couple of Generic you want so that we can get the Some of those for people But rate increases we've hit on this a lot We just don't have any bullet points But let's throw some bullet points on here because the whole point of this is these are things that you can do so One of the things under rate increases is do them monthly if you do them monthly you get your money faster So you get more money coming in sooner when you do them monthly and there are other benefits as well, which we already talked about Um, do your rate increases? Go ahead. I'm sure it's the anniversary day I mean, there's no rule saying it has to be every 12 months, but I like anniversary day. Yeah, and I think that's the easiest way to keep people on track too Yeah, and if it's not anniversary date, then what is it for you, you know Some people have an audit gate for for their different, you know They do all of their audits on the 15th of the month and so they do their pricing or the rate increases After they do the audit. That's fine, too. Whatever works But anniversary is a nice date that all of our clients have I'll give you an exception to that for the work that we do for other businesses like we do some offices and You know vacation rentals and stuff like that. It's a b2b relationship. We call it resummercial work I mean, it looks like residential cleaning. I mean, it's kind of the same activity the same people But we're building a company as opposed to a consumer Yeah, we we do all of those in fourth quarter going into effect january 1st Because that's where most people's budgets are and we found over the years It's like if we try to do a rate increase in june, you know, even though that might be their anniversary day So we're already got our budget together for this year. We didn't plan for that. So Oh, that makes good sense stick that on there tom bullet point for b2b That's a really good point So maybe a different line because we don't want this under monthly This is going to be done annually. I would be annually. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point That's really really important to know and that's so true. I've had I've had that happen to me where they're like That's not in the budget Our budget set All right, all right. What else do we want to say about rate increases as Something that they oh consistently. So don't Once you start don't stop Make sure that you keep doing them Also, um, I think that setting the expectation with the client is so helpful. Leslie mentioned this yesterday, too I think it was less Maybe it was robin Talk much from now. You're going to be getting a 5% increase. Yeah, it was robin. Yeah set the expectation in advance uh, there was um There was something that you were talking about tom about I can't remember how How you brought it up, but it was about like if the cost of living is at Two and a half percent. You don't want to raise your rate by just two and a half percent because you're not going to grow you're Yeah, I mean Inflation is relatively low. It's less than two percent now has been for for a good while I mean there there've been times In our lifetime that it's been pushing 20 percent Where do you find that information tom? I think that would be really helpful for people Oddly enough, um, it's the department of labor Okay, um I hear you typing, but I don't see anything happening as I'm doing it over in the wrong place Be our labor statistics I mean here's some other sites that probably easier to use but this is kind of the official You'd have to drill around in here a little bit um I like that calculator. What was that? us inflation calculator. Oh historical right, so maybe not I love calculators So these are the rates by recent. Oh, this is this is so easy just right there on the thing Can you drop that link in for us tom? Sure? All right So you definitely want to be raising your rates more than just the rate of inflation because if you did it exactly at inflation or Heaven forbid less than inflation. You're actually losing ground instead of gaining ground and so the the point of your Your rate increases is to be growing your business not shrinking it Now these inflation rate numbers though if you read the fine print on how they calculate these numbers and I haven't done that in a while. So I'm a bit sketchy on the details, but I know that they don't often reflect A lot of things. I don't think they include energy like things like gasoline which can be more volatile And I don't think that it necessarily reflects Things like if minimum wage goes up significantly for you your business That you know 1.4 percent They do these one these calculations here. They they have this thing they call a basket of goods And they change that from time to time, but it's Just normal junk at you buy some of it is Like a tv set for instance and the price of those has gone down over time So that kind of makes it look good the cost of goods, right? Yeah, so tom, how does this compare to the cola Um schedule because that's usually what I use the cost of living adjustment And that's usually where I go to get my information About what I'm doing There it is. Yeah cola I don't know how this is calculated 1.3. I thought for sure you would Well It's 1.3 percent pretty close to standard living. I'm sure there's there's uh the cost of living. I'm sure there's You know a correlation between between how they do it, but um, I guess this affects people who um Social security benefits, I guess are affected by this federal retirement benefits Maybe yep Yep, all of that stuff is so I usually the reason why I use this, um cost of living adjustment and I use cola as um The number that I start with is because most people understand that especially like the Older people that are maybe on a fixed income too. They understand that there needs to be A cola that needs to happen because they get hit with it too so That's usually why I have used this remember we had this Thing that I sent out about too long ago from bernie sanders about I can't find it what If they go to $15 an hour, it's going to be like over five years or so You mean federally or what do you mean federally? Yeah, like 15 at a federal level But the individual states will do at that point, um That is still in the bill That the house is going to pass on friday If you can make it through the senate or not, you know, they don't know The senate's got another proposal where they'll take the minimum wage to ten dollars an hour But you know those are the type of things that have the potential of taking your labor Which is really your cost of goods sold, right? You're loaded direct roll, you know loaded direct payable to revenue number And it can make that go up a double digit increase bang just like that overnight So doing a rate increase of of of you know, three percent I mean that get that covers you for whatever the cost of you know, whatever whatever's in the basket of goods that Cost of living or this cola adjustment here is but that doesn't begin to make you whole if there's any So Don't don't you know, if that if any of those things become real and Take this When they do our minimum wage went up. This is a couple years back now by a a big chunk all in one year I want to say two dollars and 20 cents or something in one year and We had to make a big A big rate adjustment that year We just started in right after it was Um Signed in the law that we were going to be doing this and that that was a harder sell For our clients for sure because those You know, normally your rate increases are, you know Few bucks Right, we gave some examples the other day three five percent whatever you're only looking at Usually less than ten dollars But when you're having to adjust because minimum wage went up Over two dollars We had to make some bigger bigger changes there and on top of we had to be you know We had to raise for the cola as well as the Minimum wage going up. So that that was a trickier a trickier time. And I know a lot of people are dealing with that Colorado is talking about their theirs is going up again pretty significantly in 2021 maybe sometime this year april, maybe And PPP could be another example if you had to really For a large Period of time, especially if maybe you are doing a lot of commercial work and you're having to Do more with your PPP that That that that could be something too I mean PPE sorry guys Okay Any significant change in your cost structure? Yeah, you've got to pass that along Or at least try and if you don't and you've got to be careful also when I I don't think I have shared this story in a while that um Gas, do you guys remember when gas prices went crazy? Out of this world. They were up almost to five dollars an hour. They're like at four Yeah an hour. Yeah a gallon And so we tacked on a two dollar two dollar y'all A two dollar travel fee to our clients and I will tell you I got more pushback on that two dollars than I did on any other adjustment increase anything that I had ever done and A friend of mine up north april lane She added on I can't remember how much she added on it was a different amount. It was more I want to say five dollars But what she did was she positioned it that because All of her team members were solos and driving their own cars All of this money was going to be sent directly over to the team members and she got no pushback So you got to be careful how you position this stuff too So if your minimum wage is going up and that's why you're having to raise your rates Then make sure that the customer knows that you're doing it to go directly to some of this stuff Yes Oh, yeah gas was horrible. Okay. What's Sam got we do a price increase at the same time as a rate adjustment Do you separate them in the client letters that you can see each one? I think that might be stressful for them You should just tell them the reasons and give them the bottom line So we probably have different opinions on this. Um, I'll go first on this one. Um, I would not do I Would only do a rate adjustment if I have to do a rate adjustment. I'm not talking about price increases I'll probably roll it up in there But I'm going to call the whole thing a rate adjustment The whole reason that we're doing this right now is not because we're trying to raise your price It's because we have not priced you correctly For for whatever reason But ideally there would be no reason to ever be doing a rate adjustment and a price increase at the exact same time If you're doing a rate adjustment because say Somebody took all their carpet out now. They switched everything over to Tile floor with white grout All right, they they understand that that's going to cost more It's going to cost it's gonna But you need to help them understand right you need to help them understand Yeah, and there's a really good reason that is outside of we're not just raising your price to be Charging more and to make more money It's because this is an adjustment to your actual rate We actually Cannot continue to clean your home in the same amount of time with this new flooring that you have so, um Part of is a timing thing too, you know like If they put the new flooring in just you know, just put it in in their anniversary date Which will be the dates as you normally do their increases Say, you know two months from now You don't want to anticipate that and handle that as part of the rate adjustment You're not going to be giving them a rate increase two months after the rate adjustment. Yeah, right That's I so we're on the same page kind of roll it up. I understand how you got in the predicament sam That makes perfect sense Sam on it during the pandemic and I think there were a lot of people in that same boat So that's really good. I'm glad you pointed that out Um, a lot of people were not comfortable raising rates during the pandemic Which I totally understand people were losing their jobs And a lot of people just weren't working at all. You were losing clients like crazy People were afraid of the virus and they weren't even sure they wanted people in their home to begin with Give me another reason to cancel my service Last thing you wanted to do was be raising Right, so I I totally understand how that could happen So in that situation sam, I think that people are expecting a price increase. So this one is different and that I would still Not still in this case. I would Present it as a price increase That and then I would say all of the different things that were Why we're increasing because they know about the PPE They know about a lot of the stuff and if there is an adjustment piece in there too, then I might add that in But I would definitely do them together not separately But on the anniversary date Like especially if you're setting the expectation as a new, you know, when they're becoming A new customer that you know every anniversary date we do a rate increase. Yeah You send them a lot. We used to say send them a lot or you send them an email Yeah, letting them know that in the anniversary day, we took a look at, you know, your rate and everything's in a line and You know, there'll be no, you know increase You know at this time So you're planning to seed in their head even though you didn't do the rate increase They'll be expecting it that time next year Yeah, I I think in sam's situation it's a little bit different because She just didn't communicate anything about increases or adjustments during that time and I'm guessing a lot of people did Actually, I know a lot of people did I've talked to quite a few people that did this And so you want to get them back on track as soon as you think It's Possible to get them back on track. He might not want to write around for May for their price increase, which is their anniversary date or whatever We go ahead. I need to get it done. Yeah, I totally understand sam Yeah It does throw you off a little bit. I might still be looking for how I can Get them back on to their anniversary date. I would be trying just because It's easier to to to do them monthly And I like getting that money sooner when whenever I can I don't know that that's a that's a good good point right there. So And something else that I guess ties into this whole thought process of you know, it's now a bad time to do the rate increase is This is all negotiable You know, most customers will clients will take it and won't say anything Some may will grumble a little bit Some you might even have to haggle with a little bit Rarely does somebody just say, okay, I got this email saying there's a rate increase Just take me off the schedule. I quit without a discussion Yeah, that's rare unless it's big that like if you did a big if you tried to combine an adjustment and an increase Then you can have that happening But if you're just doing your standard annual increase, that's rare that people are just like nope forget it You raise my price again this year and I'm not having it five dollars. No way that doesn't happen often But I I love what tom said everything is negotiable if they are freaked out by that five dollar Price increase once a year You can negotiate with them, you know, mrs. Johnson, you are one of my favorite clients. I don't want to lose you Here are some options, right? You can either give them options or you could even not do anything You can let them keep their price if you want to you didn't want to change them at all How about asking them for a referral? Because if they give you a referral, that's worth way more than the five dollars that you were going to charge them anyway You're you're only limited by your imagination in terms of that you can throw into the Discussion to get more value out of out of the relationship If you're going to put if the your revenue per hour in that home isn't where it needs to be Well, what else can they do to help you with? And we've done that. I mean we we've we've over the years. We've had clients that give us gobs of referral business And we'll give them a discount. We'll clean them at a lower hourly rate because Because they're worth it. Yeah. Yeah, you're bringing me in so much business. Absolutely sure. I know that too. Yeah, absolutely um Sam so Let me just talk a little bit about the phone call versus an email or a text or something along those lines I know that a lot of people think that they should call if the number is bigger But and I'm not arguing that I'm I'm saying that people might like to talk about The I might like to have that conversation But I still recommend sending an email out first and laying out what the issue is and talking about what some of the options are Because when people first get hit with it, especially if it's a big amount of money A lot of people are going to be irritated their first response is going to be irritation Let them have that irritation Over the email and give them a chance to think about it and calm down and set an appointment and then Call them and talk to them if they want to talk to you. Some people do not like conflict You know that Sam Many people don't like conflict and they're not going to want to talk to you. So don't make them talk to you Give them the opportunity to get the email. That's a really good point. Liz. I'm going to add that under the rate adjustment Regardless of what mode of communication. I said email. I I think that is is is is good because It gives them a chance to think about it But the big deal is don't send them an email saying hey, we're going to raise your rate 30 40 percent 50 percent Because you might as well, you know, they're going to read that thinking that you just tell them to go That's off. Yeah, bleep themselves um Just tell them this is the situation and we've got here are some options that we have Yeah, that's a lot less threatening Lot less threatening Just just them knowing that there are options and I think we always throw in something like and if you have any other ideas We'd love to talk to you about those as well It just feels like oh, okay. This is in my it's in my control again for the customer They feel like it's under their control again So that that's a really big deal um Both of these are really important. You know, I mean we we've hammered on it, but They're it's hard for people to do, you know, I I think most cleaning companies Don't do these things well. Don't do them regularly Yeah regularly is the consistently they just don't do it consistently and really When it comes to cleaning businesses, I think if you could only pick one word Not we're not including profit. Okay One word That the thing that you need to focus on more than anything I would say consistency is going to be the key More than quality more than times more than anything Consistency is really big for what you provide for the customer is what I'm talking about right here So this that's huge Huge All right So anything else that you guys can think of that people can do with regards to rate increases how what Anything that we should be adding to this list to help people to do them and just get her done Oh, I do have one more thing So when you're afraid So a lot of times, you know, we've talked about this a lot Sometimes you're afraid to do rate increases. Okay. Here's how you get over it. If you're afraid Pick your least favorite clients, whichever ones you don't like. They're just rude. They're obnoxious You don't get paid enough whatever reason it is that you don't like them. Okay I just picked five of them and raise their rates And just do them the way you would do anybody else and just send out their Their rate increases and see what happens worst case scenario. They say No way. I don't like you. I'm never doing business with you again and you get to celebrate Finally, I'm rid of these terrible people And and there should be a correlation between you say at least favorite, you know, I'm gonna say least maybe least profitable too So that might be why they're your least favorite Because you don't make any money there Maybe you've got there, you know, you've done whatever necessary rate adjustments may have been necessary And even you've got their hourly rate to to where you you need it to be but Maybe they're on the fringe of your service delivery area. Maybe They complain a lot and they move their schedule And skip jobs Yeah, complain to them It's not one house that you break something every month in oh my gosh Julie Richards Ah poor Julie Richards. We broke something at her house five count them five times in a row y'all Every two weeks five times. I was like Julie. I'm sorry. We can't clean air anymore Your house is jinxed for us. We can't do it It was terrible, especially when Some of the breakage is like, well, there's a scratch on my refrigerator and you guys did it and there's a You know Floor over here and you guys it's like That's absolutely worse. Yeah, maybe we did but I don't you know Yeah, we we don't remember doing that. All right, so test your plan on your least favorite And just if you're just still afraid just only pick five Because all even if all five of those people left you You're going to be in a better place just to get rid of the burden of these these awful Clients. Okay. I know a lot of times we keep these people that are just Sucking the lives out of our companies Um, and this is one way to to do it and if these least Favorite people stay Chances are good real good that the customers that you like will let that like you Are not going to have any problem either. So test your plan if they say you should have done a larger rate increase Probably probably it's true Maybe sometimes that's true um, all right anything else that we want to think about with Rate increases that we didn't say anybody have any ideas that's on the call That we didn't list here I think this is the bulk of it tom pick so remember you don't have to at all but But do do this stuff so pick how you're going to do it because this is what we got a green number here We want this number to be going up and you don't have to do everything But you need to do as many things as you can do to get this number up where you want it to be And if you're going to do these every month You want to go ahead and you want to get your customers together now who have an anniversary day in march Yeah, because you don't want to wait until You know, it's one week, you know, it's the third week of march and say, okay Well, I guess we need to do our rate increases for march yet because it just won't happen And they won't get done then they'll go out in april and then next year they have a really shortened amount of time Before the letter goes out in april. You maybe give them a couple of weeks or not They don't actually feel like they're increasing until may next year. You try to do it in march It's like it's only been a few months since you last gave me a rate increase. That's what it feels like so How quickly Between between the time that you announce the the rate increase and send the email How long do you give them before that increase goes into effect? So there's a lot of different schools of thought on the some people do it immediately Effective immediately. So even if your next cleaning is tomorrow, it's at this new rate Um, some people give two weeks notice so that everybody will be able to get one more cleaning I do mine at the beginning of the next month So like if it's like right now if we had done In february 4 march then the price increase would go into effect march march first How about you tom? What do you guys do? There is a time and i'm going back to when we were printing off Word, you know microsoft word mail merged, you know letters Yeah envelopes That that we would we give them like 30 days like four weeks um In part just because we figured well, it's going to be by the time we printed everything and You know got a lot of the mail and they got it. They're gonna lose a week anyway um That was probably even too long then you know today. Well, we'll pick like Uh a monday, you know no more than two weeks out And you know, we won't we won't make it immediately, but we make it pretty tight Maybe they get a cleaning in on the old rate. Maybe they don't we really don't care So like all of our price increases For how ours work is if you're getting a price increase if your anniversary date was in march Then your price increase is going to start march first So you're going to get the letter in february. We start processing them in february sometime and um, you know Because we do audits on them. So I would say most of our people will get an audit done They'll be done by the middle of the month So middle of the month is usually when the emails go out, but if you're not getting cleaned until March 14th, it's going to be a month until you're getting a Your your first price increase It's going to go up remember back in the old days when people used to write checks And people just are ready you checks right then like they get your letter And then they're very next cleaning you would tell them that they had a month and you're very next cleaning They'd have the new price a lot On the flip side of it too though, they'd be writing you checks with the old amount and you'd have to call them up and Say that you know, there's supposed to be three dollars more here Oh, or you won't catch it for um, two three months and then you're like, hey you owe us 21 dollars That would happen too. Yeah All right, anything else here? you know What do you do with? clients that are In a in a danger zone who aren't happy people that you you you are good clients or good profitable clients, but you know They had a bad complaint recently. Do you go ahead and Send the rate increase on the anniversary date or do you try to get into better standing first? We do We um, we we give it at least one more cleaning. We have to have a good we have to have a good rating Uh, we have a scale of one to five. So we have to have at least a four rating So you want you want that excellent or at least a good scorecard at least a good scorecard. Yeah, at least good So what do you guys do we look at that as well? I mean all of our audit Again, it's a made central thing, but you know the the whole control that does the The rate increase is that's one of the metrics that gives you like these are all the people whose anniversary date comes up On this time and you can plug in whatever Dollar amount you want, but it also shows you some of the metrics and one of them is They're they're their most recent scorecard score. So if it's bad, you say just say no, I'm not going to Not today Because you know, somebody just had a two scorecard or three scorecard with a lot of comments, right? Sometimes people don't want to give you anything less than that middle score They think it's going to make somebody feel bad But they got a lot of comments and I was that was missed Yeah, um, and then they get hit with a price increase right on top of that. It's like No They start looking I would I start looking I I would be interested in Who who do you have clean your house? Yeah, I'd be interested. Yeah, if if I'm going to be frustrated and disappointed I can find somebody else to do that for me Yep all day every day Yeah, that's a good one Um, so you should put that one on there Tom um rate increases and maybe as that bullet point is audit for quality or um service quality or I say, you know, you may want to wait I Think most of us would you know, it's easy to say everything is negotiable, but If you know somebody's not happy, you don't want to go ahead and stick their finger your finger in their eye Yeah, I agree. That's not the easiest All right. Well, I think this page is done Tom and we are at top of the hour So this kpi is complete Yes Yep, and we are Well, we'll see what we'll talk about tomorrow. It's we're gonna pull we're gonna start pulling all this together We're gonna be wrapping this up this this this whole larger kpis for profit discussion Well, we'll have some some work to do next week, but at that point we'll we'll be done. We're also Having some discussions trying to figure out how we can do some of this within zoom calls We could do this whole thing again in zoom. It would be completely different because people would have questions and we could Yep We could talk talk about the stuff have a conversation But um, it is top of the hour. So you guys take care. Thanks for uh, Helping helping out Sam. Good seeing you. We'll uh be here tomorrow 5 o'clock. Bye. Bye. Bye y'all